This post stands for your personal, professional, and academic goals as well.

If you've been following us for a while, you know we often emphasize the importance of setting goals for you research experience. (If you started following us recently, welcome!)

Whatever your goals are for your research experience, you'll have a much easier time achieving them if your mentor knows about them, and if you ask what you need to do to achieve them.

What is ever better than getting an exciting research result? Understanding why it's important!

Learning the background information associated with your project is an essential step to understanding the full significance of your research project. Background information includes learning the basic information about your project, why it's important, and how it supports the overall research goals of the lab. The more background you understand, the more you'll be able to contribute to all parts of your project.

There are many reasons you should put yourself though the special kind of stress that accompanies presenting your research. This post will cover two.

1) To build your resume or CV. Whether you apply for a fellowship, scholarship, or med/grad/prof school, the more presentations you have to list the better off you'll be. Most selection committees rank research presentations as a quality-rich activity.

Before starting an experiment, you should be able to predict what the results will be if you're successful, and what the results might be if you're not.

Although you won't be able to anticipate every possible outcome for every experiment, knowing the probable ones before you start will help you understand and correctly interpret the results you get.

Not only will this help you become a more independent researcher, but also it will help you make a more meaningful connection with your project.

When you're in a rush to wrap up your lab day, it may be temping to save a little time and not label a tube, bottle, or component--after all you know what it is. But that is a sure recipe for disaster.

When placing your tubes in the microcentrifuge, If your research supervisor doesn’t have a preference, then always place the tubes hinge up. If you develop this habit, it might serve you well--depending on the type of research you do.

For example, if you have a pellet after the spin, you’ll always know that it will be opposite the hinge*. If instead of a pellet, you have a streak of material on the side of the tube, you'll know which side to avoid when pipetting off excess liquid.